Stormwater Partners Network

Dear Stormwater Partners,

It’s been awhile since we last met, and I’m organizing a meeting for early May.

Mark Symborski of the Montgomery Planning Dept. will brief us on the Environmental Site Design (ESD) aspects of the Zoning Code revision.  

The event will be held at ANS-Woodend on the evening of

Tuesday, May 8., from 6:30 to 9:00 pm. (Meeting starts at 7:30 pm)  

The address:  8940 Jones Mill Road, Chevy Chase, MD 20815

Agenda:  We will have our traditional potluck social hour from 6:30 to 7:30 pm, the meeting will start at 7:30 pm with announcements; then we will have Mark’s presentation and discussion from 7:45 to 9:00 pm.

Please RSVP to let me know you will be there, and what you will bring (beverages; main dishes; side dishes/ chips; and desserts are all welcome.)  And please forward this invitation to your list servs and active members.

Thanks,

Diane

Conservation Montgomery is hosting a dance party at Pathways Offices, 9339 Fraser Avenue, Silver Spring, MD  20910 on April 28th to raise money for tree planting in Montgomery County.
See http://www.conservationmontgomery.org/pdf/DANCE%20FOR%20THE%20TREES.pdf for information about it.  The flyer can also be found here.

Dear Stormwater Partners and Friends,

Happy Valentine’s Day!

This Thursday, February 16, the Montgomery County Stormwater Partners Network are meeting with DEP - including DEP Director Bob Hoyt and Watershed Division Chief Steve Shofar — at DEP’s large meeting room, from 7 pm to 9 pm (see location information and agenda below.)

I hope that you can join us for this meeting - we have a full agenda that will cover the waterfront on stormwater permit, funding, stream protection and related issues.

Please join us if you can, and RSVP to me (if you haven’t already) at dianecameron60@gmail.com.

Thanks very much,

Diane

Agenda for the Joint Stormwater Partners - DEP meeting on Feb. 16, 2012
7:00 pm to 9:00 pm
Location:  DEP’s “Ozone” meeting room, 255 Rockville Pike, Rockville MD 20850.

Read the rest of this entry »

In today’s New York Times, there is a terrific article titled Harnessing Local Pride for Global Conservation which describes how an organization called Rare has used social communication technologies to achieve environmental successes at various places around the world.

In St. Lucia, a trained advocate “believed that the government needed to establish a sanctuary for the parrot and institute tough penalties — but there was not enough public support to make it happen. He got the idea to launch a campaign, with government support, to tap the islanders’ sense of pride. He created a parrot mascot — Jacquot — and got volunteers to dress up in colorful costumes and visit schools. He printed T-shirts, created puppet shows, commissioned children’s magazines, encouraged hotels to print bumper stickers, convinced a popular band to record a song about the parrot, and asked ministers to quote Bible verses about good stewardship. The campaign took off, the government passed the laws, and the parrot was saved.”

It seems to me this approach could be used in the Anacostia and other local watersheds.   Last year in response to Anacostia Watershed Citizens Advisory Committee requests, a MD DNR staff person floated the above image of “Annie” a female belted kingfisher as a possible mascot for the Anacostia.

The NY Times article concludes with this quote by the advocate who came up with the parrot idea: “And let’s not forget the power that emotions have in driving behavior.”

In December, the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission met with staff of the Anacostia Watershed Society to provide an overview of the results from the WSSC’s monitoring of 2007-2011.  (I had been invited to attend as a representative of Friends of Sligo Creek, but had the time wrong and missed the meeting).   The WSSC is required to monitor area creeks for bacteria with source tracking as a result of a consent decree order in 2005.  The results of the monitoring have been compiled on a page on the Friends of Sligo Creek web site.

The presentation made by the WSSC can be found here.  A preliminary qualitative observation is that 80-100% of the bacteria sources in area streams has been found to be pets, wildlife, and agriculture.  This highlights the need for continued introduction of stormwater reducing technologies to reduce this pollution in our waterways.

Note: The comment in slide 4 “Suggestions from AWS considered: Reduce sampling points outside Anacostia watershed.”  Emphasis on the word points.  The complete suggestion was to reduce the sampling points and double the monitoring frequency at those stations, leaving the actual number of times monitoring was done unchanged at those stations.